Back in the 1960s, as the social sciences matured into the methodological and theoretical forms we practice today, two books shaped the study of comparative politics in a decisive way: Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (1966) and Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). In his new book, Francis Fukuyama takes on and extends the research agenda of both scholars—with a main focus, however, on Huntington’s research agenda. Fukuyama’s choice makes sense. In the last decades, the study of political regimes and political transitions has been cultivated intensively, reaching, in Fukuyama’s own words, a theoretical framework that, rooted in Moore’s work, is “with a few emendations … basically sound” (p. 411). By contrast, the examination of political order and decay has been sparser. Putting aside the literature on state formation spurred by Charles Tilly and Mancur Olson and a growing body of work on civil wars, we still know little about the determinants of state capacity and quality of government.
In Huntington’s book, political stability depended on the presence of “strong, adaptable, coherent political institutions” capable of channeling the processes of social mobilization unleashed by economic modernization. The Anglo-American world succeeded in retaining its traditional Tudor institutions and adapting them organically to modern society. The developing world had the almost exact reverse experience. The state was too weak to cope with the popular demands brought about by development. Structural conditions, such as the gap between city and countryside or land inequality, mattered in order to achieve stability. But for Huntington—a “Leninist” where Moore had been a “Marxist”—order was ultimately created by a revolutionary (or a reformist) vanguard through a political party (or parties) that could stabilize mass politics.
Fukuyama follows in Huntington’s footsteps in his preoccupation with political stability and institutions. However, Political Order and Political Decay unpacks the concept of political order into three dimensions—a stable and capable state, the rule of law, and (democratic) accountability—claiming that they are independent of one another: In some nations (like Denmark), they are bundled together; in others (like Somalia), they are all absent; and in many countries, only some are in place (like China, with a capable state but no rule of law). Hence, following “Huntington’s basic instinct,” political modernization has not been “a seamless and inevitable process” (p. 50) but has, rather, followed multiple, sometimes inchoate and broken, developmental paths.
Premodern societies were Malthusian economies governed by patrimonial states, “staffed with the friends and family of the ruler,” who “limited access to both political power and economic opportunity to individuals [he] favored” (p. 198), and they sustained power through patron–client networks. Political modernization took place along three alternative historical paths, each defined by the specific temporal sequence through which state, the rule of law, and accountability emerged. In the Anglo-American world, the rule of law preceded economic growth; mass democracy followed next (before the industrial revolution in the United States and during industrialization in England); and a strong state (understood as a Weberian bureaucracy employing merit-based recruitment criteria) came in last. In the German path (shared by Japan and other East Asian tigers), countries moved into modernity through the creation of a modern bureaucracy first and the adoption of the rule of law and democracy much later (brought in, to a considerable extent, by military defeat and foreign intervention). China developed along that same route, albeit in an incomplete way: Democracy and the rule of law are still missing. Finally, the third historical path, which characterizes, with various degrees of intensity, parts of Southeastern Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, is one of “modernization without development.”
The emergence of “mass politics” (and democracy), with neither a strong Weberian state nor the rule of law in place, resulted in two possible scenarios: either political decay or “a stable system of clientelism and elite coalitions built around the distribution of rents” (p. 530). Absent a process of industrialization and a corresponding modern middle class that could carry out the modernization policies that the American middle classes implemented in the nineteenth century to weed out the clientelistic networks of Jacksonian democracy, those countries have no prospects of “getting to Denmark,” that is, “an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed” (p. 25).
Fukuyama’s basic intuition about the need to disaggregate political development into several dimensions is correct. It is unfortunate, however, that the book does not deal with the expansion and consolidation of the rule of law in the same systematic way it does for state capacity. As for the latter, it has at least two meanings: the capacity to maintain the monopoly of force over a given population and territory, and state capacity as quality of performance. The former is treated by Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order (2011), preceding the book reviewed here. Political Order and Political Decay focuses on the latter: Its examination is impressive and thought provoking.
After pointing out that there is no “scholarly agreement on a standardized way of measuring state quality” (p. 61), Fukuyama first embraces a well-known outcome measure, the World Bank’s government effectiveness index, to capture state capacity (as quality of performance). But right afterward he identifies it with the introduction of a rational or Weberian bureaucracy, that is, an autonomous public administration run by personnel selected on merit principles and deciding according to technical principles (either legal rationality or scientific management). Indeed, having a modern bureaucracy is likely to be a necessary condition to having a capable state. But the book would have benefited from deploying more direct evidence showing that a merit-based bureaucracy leads to (or is correlated with) government effectiveness. Perhaps more importantly, the book does not clarify whether a Weberian state is a sufficient condition for having good institutional performance. Just consider today’s Chinese state. Its “Weberianism” seems very limited, with elites having a strong say in the discriminatory allocation of rents to allies. Yet it arguably is a strong state, capable of coercing people and mobilizing resources quite effectively. In a way, that seems to vindicate Huntington’s theory: It may well be that the Chinese state is strong because the Chinese Communist Party (rather than China’s bureaucracy) vertebrates it. Finally, Fukuyama does not spell out whether having a Weberian bureaucracy is endogenous to other historical conditions. According to Robert Putnam, for example, even though Italy’s regional institutions were identical, their performance depended on their level of social capital and civic engagement and how they affected, in turn, personnel recruitment and the allocation of resources.
The theory that the three dimensions of political development are independent of one another also calls for more debate. On the one hand, a weak state seems incompatible with having the rule of law (defined in the book as “rules of behavior … binding even the most powerful political actors in the society” (p. 24)), since a patrimonial state implies the unequal access of individuals to state positions and resources. On the other hand, strong states with Weberian bureaucracies may not always come together with the rule of law. But even that eventuality needs to be qualified: A Weberian bureaucracy is always founded on the application of universal principles (or the rule of law) in the particular sphere (administrative decision making) where it operates; without them, it collapses into a clientelistic structure. A similar problem arises with the relationship between rule of law and accountability. Without a full franchise making all individuals equal, the “binding” condition that defines the rule of law cannot be fulfilled. The latter remains limited to the sphere of private law while excluding the domain of political rights—the case of imperial Germany or Victorian England.
The book’s description of several political modernization trajectories is a stepping stone in our understanding of contemporary state building. Still, future researchers will have to deal with at least two questions left open by the author. First, by overemphasizing the distinctiveness of the East Asian, Latin American and sub-Saharan African historical paths, this volume underplays a high degree of variation within each continent. Countries such as Botswana, South Africa, Chile, or Mexico show similar or higher scores than China in the World Bank government effectiveness index. This must mean that twentieth-century developments (examined in the book through Argentina, Costa Rica, and Indonesia, but not systematically) eventually overcame “longue-durée” constraints that had been operating at the continental level. Second, the relationship between political and economic development remains unclear. As in Huntington, and in opposition to Moore’s insistence on the primacy of social interests, Fukuyama writes that political development “follows its own logic independent of economic growth” (p. 50) and that, contrary to the claims of economic institutionalists, growth happened both in places with the rule of law and a weak state (England) and with no rule of law but a strong state (Japan, China). Still, at some other points, the book makes political modernization endogenous to economic development—particularly when we are told that countries without a strong state have “no clear path from informal employment to true growth- and job-generating industrialization” (p. 531), something that, in turn, prevented them from reforming.
While in the last decades we have made some headway in measuring and theorizing about phenomena such as political stability, democratization, or civil wars, progress in understanding the nature and sources of state capacity and performance has proved to be much more elusive to us. For that reason, Political Order and Political Decay is an important contribution to the study of politics: it brings in both a conceptually savvy discussion and a fascinating historical exploration of the development of states since the French Revolution. At the same time, and perhaps because of its scope, it will certainly require and stimulate more work on the relationship between bureaucratic structures and state capacity, between the latter and the rule of law, and between economic and political development.
